Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Who knew Helen Liu? The Mata Hari furphy
Who knew Helen Liu?
Everyone it seems.
Who really cares?
Only Tony Abbott and Co.
Abbott was in full spate on Meet the Press last Sunday:
"I think there's absolutely no doubt that John Howard in his first term would have sacked a minister who had been as inept as this. Absolutely no doubt but look, I think there are also questions for Kevin Rudd. What's the extent of his relationship with Helen Liu? And if he does have the kind of extensive relationship with Ms Liu that it seems he might, given the reports in today's paper, perhaps he should be fronting up to this Commission of Inquiry which is currently looking in to the whole question of Joel Fitzgibbon and these disclosures."
Now if Tones the Terrible really wants to worry about something coming out of China he can try this widespread 'spying' on for size.
If what appears to be a group of teens high on big brother's alcopops could hack an Aussie government website last week, it's odds on that Australia was caught by this particular covert international digital information gathering operation which entered over a thousand computers in 103 countries and close to 30% of these were considered "high-value diplomatic, political, economic and military targets".
Monday, 30 March 2009
Is Kevin Rudd's head really that big or are his staffers just losing the plot?
Twitter is a strange beast which often seems to induce poor impulse control in politicians and their staff.
Here is a case in point:
KevinRuddPMMore photos of the PM with Defense Sec Robert Gates http://cli.gs/TpQTMa #KevinPM Team
Rudd's 11th Community Cabinet meeting coming up in WA
If you want to have a 10 minute chin wag with a minister or listen to Rudders address the forum you need to get your moniker on the list before 4pm on April Fool's Day.
Mate, if you are going to this meeting perhaps you might ask the PM a question for me:
When is the federal government going to hold one of these cabinet meetings in the NSW Northern Rivers?
Sunday, 29 March 2009
Australian Government website blacklist is so passe
I almost (but not quite) feel sorry for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy - matters just go from bad to worse whenever their grand plan to censor the Australian Internet rates a mention.
The latest Wikileaks expose of the March 2009 Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist of banned websites revealed a URL for a certain dot com gambling site.
It appears that in September last year the Commonwealth of Kentucky seized this online gambling site and its domain name, along with 140 others, under an interim order from the Franklin County Circuit Court.
However, amended order and later ruling in another court has meant that this site is not only still active but, along with its fellow allegedly illegal gambling sites, is listed on the Internet for all to see along with the various legal arguments surrounding their seizure.
Just Google "illegal gambling" and up it they come.
So the purpose of this werry secret ACMA blacklist is?
From my perspective this is a rather interesting question because the blacklist is supposedly composed entirely of URLs which have been banned by direction of ACMA/Censorship Board
On its website ACMA displays the approved Internet service provider and online content and mobile provider codes of practice.
The Authority clearly states that failure to comply with such codes may amount to an offence under the Broadcasting Services Act.
However, one researcher informs me that URLs on the blacklist can be successfully accessed using common search engines via a number of Australian Internet service providers (ISPs).
This includes blacklisted content which is hosted in Australia.
So if some ISPs currently ignore legislation, regulations and the risk of significant penalties for non-compliance and/or publishing illegal content; why would Senator Conroy believe that all ISPs will obey any new legislation imposing a larger blacklist?
Julian Rocks flaunts its underwater colours
It is home to over 1000 marine species including wobbegongs, rays, turtles, fish, nudibranchs and many more. It is an aggregation site for the endangered Grey Nurse Sharks, Carcharias taurus, who visit in winter. Leopard sharks visit Julian Rocks over summer.
This is where warm and cool waters meet, hence the enormous biodiversity. A minority of species are endemic to this area. Most are found over a wide area of the Asia-Pacific region.
Find out more about this wonderful underwater playground at www.julianrocks.net
The Daily Examiner continues to go downhill
The Daily Examiner continues to go downhill in its 150th year.
Which is a bit hard to do when you are in the middle of a rather flat Clarence Valley flood plain, but this newspaper is managing the feat.
Tabloid headlines, advertorials, articles which are nothing more than vehicles for product placement, pages in the first half of an issue which are so chocka with paid advertising that it is easy to miss the single news item - and now changes to its website which mean that local news is crowded out by interstate (dominated by Queensland) and international news.
These days if you want Northern Rivers news online then you'd be wise to link to anywhere other than APN newspapers.
It's no wonder that the Far North Coaster online magazine is becoming a popular read.
It fills a niche which Northern Rivers newspapers have obviously abandoned.
Saturday, 28 March 2009
A heart as big as Phar Lap's........... brave, beautiful... a hero [ASTI communities please note that this post mentions someone who has passed away]
An important leader in the Yamba Aboriginal community, in northern New South Wales, has died.
Christine Ferguson, 52, died a week ago.
She was the chief executive officer of the Birrigan Gargle Land Council.
The chairwoman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Bev Manton, says she was a pioneer in the fight for justice.
"Christine's been involved with the lands rights network since its inception and I guess she has kind of grown up with that political background and fighting for the rights of her people," she said.
"She was just one of those lovely people who could negotiate and not be aggressive about it, but still be forceful and obtain the results that were required."
Christine Ferguson is survived by her son Jason and three granddaughters. She was also guardian to a young boy. (Indigenous Community News Network)
The authors of North Coast Voices will miss her friendship and, along with the rest of the Clarence Valley and the Northern Rivers region, mourn her passing.
** Post title is composed of excerpts from the many eulogies at the funeral service on Friday 27 March 2009 in Maclean, NSW.
What bird is that? Channel 7 finds out the hard way
See if you can spot the difference (besides species, height, body shape and weight, plumage).
Yes - one is a noxious pest and the other a protected native species. Oh, dear. Apologies all round from Channel 7.
TOP: Indian Mynah
BOTTOM: Masked Lapwing Plover
North Coast Area Health Service "stealing from your child's Christmas account": Steve Cansdell
It's not often I find myself in agreement with the NSW Nationals MP for Clarence Steve Candsell, but when he likened the North Coast Area Health Service's fund transfers - from special purpose and trust funds holding money raised by the community for specific hospital services - as being like "stealing from your child's Christmas account" he was spot on. (Clarence Valley Review on 18th March 2009)
The fact that the NSW Auditor General has called for a formal review of how the NCAHC is handling these funds is little comfort for the region.
The health service has been sprung doing this before and will do it again, because the sad fact is that overall lack of adequate health funding plus slapdash management has meant that public health services on the NSW North Coast are operating on a wing and a prayer.
The situation makes the Rees Government's talk of a billion dollar upgrade for the Sydney Opera House look heedless and heartless.
Friday, 27 March 2009
Initial response to Conroy's response to Q&A
Senator Stephen Conroy's appearance on ABC TV Q & A program last night was either a masterstroke of political obfuscation or a demonstration of just how little understanding the Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy has of his own portfolio.
Conroy was given ample opportunity to put the case for national mandatory ISP-level filtering.
In the course of doing so he inadvertently made a few matters abundantly clear:
- Lists of banned URLs compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are open to human error.
- These errors can and do exist for sometime before being corrected.
- The owners of banned URLs are not made aware that they are on any blacklist.
- Once on the blacklist it is unlikely that a banned site will be removed, even if the offending material is removed from the website in question.
- The official ACMA blacklist contains more than just content that has been refused classification or is unlawful under Australian legislation.
- The blacklist can and does contain political content, using a commonsense definition of the term political.
- The ACMA list of banned URLs is not monitored by an independent agency and has little or no ministerial or parliamentary oversight.
- On their own initiative ISPs are capable of further expanding the blacklist provided to them by ACMA. Such expansion is not monitored by the Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy.
He is willing to tell a great many glib half-truths to the electorate in an effort to defend the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the Australian Internet.
Q & A espisode for Thursday 26 March:
download episode WMV MP4 (average size 200MB)
What the blogosphere is saying this month about the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the Australian Internet
First up, ACMA is already using its soon-to-be executive muscle to bully Australian-hosted websites into not linking to sites on its 'blacklist'. One of the sites disbarred — among many others — is a perfectly legitimate anti-abortion site that at worst could be described as 'cheesy'. ACMA's bullying is on the pricy side, too — AUD$11,000 a pop. The blacklist (as you would expect) has been leaked, while Conroy himself is now planning to 'monitor blogs'. Quite apart from the egregiousness of this exercise in censorship, it is important to realise that Ruddy is trying to bypass parliament with this stuff, so that they don't have to deal with that pesky Senate (Xenophon and the Greens as well as the Opposition in this case). Government by executive order, anyone? Skepticlawyer 23 March 2009
Is Conroy a fundy? Will this site be on his list 'cause we all know that you can't be good without religion. *Palm/Head*
You don't have to look online for sexual predators, look no further than your local church. Atheist Nexus 21 March 2009
Stephen Conroy is a Cnut 21 March 2009
STEVE CONROY BELONGS ON THE BACK BENCH AND FAILING BEING ABLE TO GET THAT RIGHT, MAY POSSIBLY FIND PURPOSE AND MEANING AS A DOOR STOP. Thinkers Podium 23 March 2009
It was only a matter of time, but it's finally happened. The DBCDE has alienated enough of its private sector partners that one of them has leaked the blacklist. Websinthe 19 March 2009
Apparently, Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is wetting his bed over the thought that his fellow Australians might think somewhat less of him for so enthusiastically promoting the idea of an Internet filter. Kerplunk 23 March 2009
Guys, we're in trouble.My assistant was reading the internet to me this morning, and do you know what she said? She said that the average punter doesn't think the filter is going to work. We're spending a couple of hundred million dollars on this thing! If John and Jane Easy-to-Scare think we're wasting money in the middle of the GFC, we're f##ked, okay? F##ked.
We've got to get these shmucks back on-side.
Leaking the list was a good start. Lots of scary-sounding websites, "violent"-this, and "rape"-that, and whoever came up with the dentist? Genius. That is the kind of attention-to-detail that makes me proud to be part of this shadowy conspiracy. People are scared of the dentist; visits are painful and expensive and wasn't someone raped at a dentist once? Why, it's almost as if "false-positives" in the list are a good thing! Nicely done.
In 1960, I bet if you told an American that men would walk on the moon, they'd have said you were crazy, then robbed you at gunpoint. But as soon as the Americans faked that moon landing, all those doubting pieholes became true believers.
I want you guys to find out what can we learn from the American experience, and how we might apply those learnings to the trial. I want it on my desk by the end of the day.
Look, we're doing good work. The Lord's work. We can't allow these Mountain Dew-sucking deviants to keep running circles around us. Get your shit together, get me some answers, then get me a latte and a mini-muffin.
Lots of love,
Fake Stephen Conroy Department of the Internets 20 March 2009 [apologies to the fake Stephen Conroy but obscenities are masked because existing voluntary filters being used by some ISPs make North Coast Voices emailing posts option difficult to use successfully otherwise]
Here's a summary of the views of many in the real and virtual world. Senior nanny Conroy is a dipstick, an unresponsive loon, an ill-mannered and unpleasant smear tactician, an intellectual thuggee, and a morally derelict moralist dedicated to calling opponents of his oppressive, inept, useless and futile proposed filtering regime supporters of paedophilia.
It's almost MadiGrass time. Come on down, Barack!
Yep, it's almost MadiGrass time again at Nimbin.
Time for all those old counter-culture warriors to dust off their good duds and march 'n' party for an end to Aussie prohibition of Teh Weed.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Web Control by Professor Julien Petley, Brunel University
Attempts to rid the Internet of pornographic material are beginning to have a wider impact on freedom of expression online writes Julien Petley in the Spring 2009 article Web Control posted at Index on Censorship.**
** Due to the Rudd Government's recent entry into the strange world of Internet censorship I do not feel comfortable placing a direct link to the article, as linking directly to this academic critique would see North Coast Voices possibly risk overt bullying by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Update: Somebody Think of the Children reports that the residence of the owner of domain name Wikileaks has been raided.
"Neo-Liberal Meltdown": the global financial crisis explained
Robert Mann writing in the March 2009 issue of The Monthly magazine explains the beginnings of the global financial crisis, for those of us who don't have an economics degree or work in the financial sector.
He makes a better fist of it than the Prime Minister in his previous essay in the same magazine.
The causes of the global financial crisis are already reasonably clear. The crisis originated in a series of interconnected developments within the American financial sector. From the 1980s a vast market in obscure and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives developed there. The market grew at an accelerating pace. In 1989 it was worth US$2 trillion; by 2002, $100 trillion; and by September 2008, almost $600 trillion. (The annual GDP of the United States is presently about $15 trillion.) This explosion of the market in derivatives depended, in turn, on ideological convictions and political acts. In 1998 Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, argued for the regulation of this market. Without it, she argued, the American economy and the global economy were being placed at risk. She was overpowered by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and President Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin. Shortly after, Congress withdrew from the CFTC the authority to regulate derivatives. At much the same time, as a consequence of a $300-million lobbying campaign by financial corporations, Congress also repealed President Roosevelt's 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Its purpose had been to separate the commercial banks, which had become involved in the speculative frenzy of the '20s, from the activities of the investment banks. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act opened all the American major banks to massive involvement in the derivatives market. More deeply, as Joseph Stiglitz has argued in Vanity Fair, the repeal completed the transformation of American banking culture.
The post-2000 derivatives explosion was also aided by American monetary policy. Greenspan reacted to the bursting of the dotcom bubble by steadily lowering official interest rates. In 2000-01 they dropped rapidly from 6.5% to 3.5%. By 2003 they had reached 1%. Effectively, at least for bankers, as Charles Morris puts it in his book The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, money was now free. At this time the explosion in the derivatives market intersected with the explosion in another market, sub-prime mortgage lending, which rose from US$145 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005. On the basis of a housing bubble, which increased the price of houses by an annual 7-8%, borrowers with low incomes and no assets were encouraged by banks and mortgage brokers to purchase houses worth several hundred thousand dollars. Derivative traders saw these sub-prime mortgages as a splendid opportunity. They bundled up the mortgages and created from them esoteric derivatives products - like collateralised mortgage obligations or collateralised debt obligations - which were then sold on in their trillions to investors and pension funds. In an article for Portfolio, Michael Lewis gives a telling example of how the racket worked. Big Wall Street firms took piles of sub-prime mortgages with a BBB rating. They bundled them into new products and divided these products into tranches. The top 60% of these tranches were rated AAA. Lewis's informant, Steve Eisman, who made his fortune by 'shorting' the corporations and the products involved in this trade (that is, gambling on their failure), kept asking himself: How is this possible; why is this allowed?......
The systematically phoney evaluations of the derivative products and the corporations which dealt in them, pocketing substantial fees with each contract, arose as a result of a straightforward but fatal ratings-agency conflict of interest. The profits of the agencies derived from the Wall Street banks and investment businesses they were supposed to rate. The continuation of their own very healthy profit growth relied on their willingness to turn a blind eye. Yet the fraudulent behaviour of Wall Street rested on another, even deeper, kind of blindness: the ideological blindness of the regulators. Most important here was the regulator-in-chief, Alan Greenspan, the most enthusiastic derivatives cheerleader, who believed with regard to derivatives (and everything else) that the invisible hand of the market was an infinitely more reliable and intelligent guide than any regulatory action by the state........
It is obvious whose interest all this served. Before the recent crash, the average taxable income of the top 15,000 American income earners was US$30 million; their annual income in total, US$441 billion. In the mid 1970s the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned approximately 20% of national assets. On the eve of the financial collapse they owned some 40%. Very many of these people derived their income and their wealth from the financial sector. In 2008, even after the sector had begun imploding, the executives of the Wall Street corporations that were eventually rescued by taxpayers rewarded themselves with US$18 billion in bonuses. Vast riches had apparently come to be seen by this predatory class as an entitlement.
The full essay here.
How much the Australian Government has borrowed because of the global financail crisis to date is here.
